You are looking at a holiday shopping list which is the epitome of consumerism. You shouldn't find things that are elevating the human spirit you are looking for stuff that you would find in skymall or the home shopping network.

There are plenty of yc companies tackling interesting problems - you just wouldn't find them on a holiday list. For example:

Triplebyte - trying to take a data driven approach to make recruiting for more scientific

Gitlab - building cool open source software to host your code

Higherme - building customized education software to help kids learn math and science

Priceconomics - they have some of the most interesting content coming out of tech (opposite of huffpo/buzzfeed/etc)

Zapier - ifttt for the enterprise / lots of cool tools for companies

Mixpanel - power modern analytics for companies

I think it's unfair to judge all of yc based on a holiday shopping list which by its definition should cater to our consumerist desires. The most interesting companies shouldn't be on this list since most wouldn't have a product that is bought by consumers.